So after deciding that I wouldn’t bother this year, I gave in when the new fixture list was published last week.
After multiple lines of copy paste, edit, tweak I began to think surely my computer can be doing most of this. So I sat down and spent more time than I would have liked looking at the Google Calendar API, and finally managed to knock together some PHP which took the text I had copied from the FAWSL fixture list and inserted them as Google Calendar events.
Fortunately I can now reuse this code for future seasons and other possible events like the Euros or World Cup.
But now that it’s done what next. Well the calendar is public so if you too want the fixtures you can add the calendar to your account. The easiest way is to click the 
button below. Or if you prefer ICAL or XML copy the link address and add it to your software.
As with my other public calendars I will try to ensure that it is up to date as possible, but this does require noticing when a fixture has been moved. Let me know if you spot any.
Category Archives: Calendars
World Cup 2010 Google Calendar
It has become impossible for me to update the original calendar, Google keeps timing out when I try to save loosing any changes I have made.
Instead I have created an ICAL file which you can import in to Google yourself, copy this link https://blog.artesea.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/World-Cup.ics and paste it in to the “Add a friend’s calendar” box on the bottom left of Google Calendar.
I will be saving this calendar twice a day after each of the matches. Hopefully you should get the changes quickly on your new Google Calendar.
I also suggest you remove the old calendar as it seems to have some impact on the speed in which the other calendars load and sync.
(You can now ignore above, everything seems to be fine. Looks like Google crashed out when iOS4 came out and everyone re-synced their phones at the same time).
As there isn’t one is the preset list from Google for next years World Cup in South Africa, I’ve created this myself. If you wish to add it to your own Google Calendar click on the + icon at the bottom right.
I will be updating the knockout stages as soon as we know which teams will be in each fixture.
SORRY IF THE CALENDAR IS TAKING IT’S TIME TO LOAD, THIS SEEMS TO BE A PROBLEM WITH GOOGLE SHARING IT WITH SO MANY PEOPLE
Feedback in the comments suggest that if your Google Calendar is set to your timezone the fixtures will appear with the correct time for you. eg BST, PST, EST, CET, JST…
Alternate formats: XML | ICAL | HTML
To get the football icons (or others) next to your events on your own calendar, you need to enable Labs in Google Calendar, and there is an option to add “Event Flair”. When you next add or edit an event you should see a choice of icons on the right hand side.
If you wish to get the calendar on your mobile, you might consider using Goosync, you’ll need a premium account to sync calendars other than your primary one. They are available from £19.99.
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Discovering Public Google Calendars – Gone!
One of the great features about having a Google Calendar was the ability to make a calendar public. This meant that if I wanted to have the 2009 F1 schedule, instead of manually typing it out myself I could search for “F1” and it would return ready made calendars. There were some small issues with the public calendars. For example the times would be set to various different time zones making them a bit pointless for me, or the author would insist on using CAPS FOR EVERYTHING, so on the odd (read that as most) occasions I would end up creating my own, but then making them public to the world.
Yesterday, after the World Cup draw I sat down and copied and pasted the fixtures using the BBC and FIFA as source reference. Two hours of work have resulted in a nice calendar in a format that I want. I mentioned on Twitter that I would share it, and got some requests back. What I was surprised to find when testing the “share” feature on the netbook logged in under Heathers account was that there was no longer an option to Search Public Calendars. Assuming I was missing something, I looked all over the Google Calendar page, still nothing. Next stop was the Help pages, a quick search for Public resulted in this The “Search Public Calendars” button is missing from my Google Calendar. All I have is “Search My Calendars”. It has 172 posts, no official reply from Google and it started back in February!
Turns out Google have a help page explaining why they removed the service
Removing public calendar search and the public calendar gallery
We’ve decided to discontinue public calendar search and the public calendar gallery. These were specialized U.S. English-only features that weren’t used as extensively as we would have liked, and proved difficult to maintain over time. We’re looking at ways to make it easier to search and browse public calendars, but for now we’ve removed the gallery and public calendar search function.
“Difficult to maintain”, were not talking about an undergrad with a project that suddenly exploded, we are talking about Google, the guys who index over a trillion webpages and ensure the search results are returned in under a second.
So for the time being if you wish to share my Google Calendar for the World Cup (all times UK based), click on the following link, and in the bottom corner click on this icon . Alternativly past the Calendar ID: [email protected] into the box which says “Add a friend’s Calendar” when you are in Google Calendar.
ps. My three year old Arsenal Calendar, which is updated as soon as I’m informed of fixture changes has the ID: [email protected]